“If you build it, they will come.”
This is the biggest lie that Field of Dreams ever told.
By now, you’ve built your website, it’s full of content, hugely valuable and it’s beautiful, right?!
But why is no one looking at it?
Why do people not want to witness this work of art that has taken you hours to create? Let’s rip the Band-Aid off, shall we?
No one is looking at your website, because they don’t know it exists.
As of September 2014, the internet hit a milestone of having 1 billion websites in existence and that’s fast approaching the 2 billion mark currently.
So, with well over 1,000,000,000 websites online, what are the chances that someone is going to stumble upon yours?
It doesn’t matter how beautiful, creative, different, unique, special, valuable, or relevant your website is; no one is going to look at it unless you metaphorically grab them by the face and make them look at it.
Before we go into it, we need to tell you about keywords and key phrases. Firstly, what are they? A keyword – or more importantly – a key phrase, is a particular word or phrase that describes the contents of a webpage or your business. These phrases are what allows your website to be found and should be scattered throughout your website and its content.
What makes a good and accurate keyword?
Great question, I’m glad you asked!
The more accurate and relevant the keyword is, the better it will be.
For example, if you were a bicycle repair company, relevant keywords would be:
· Bike repair
· Bike puncture
· Tyre replacement
These are all “good” keywords… but is good what we’re after?
How can we take it to the next level? We can add more geographic terms to capture a certain area? For example:
· Bike repair London
· Bicycle shop Waterloo
One better? Let’s have a think about what our customers might actually search for. For example:
· Cheap bike repair in London
· Best bike servicing in London
· How to fix a bike puncture
· Where can I get my bike fixed in London?
You can see that by diving deeper into our keywords and key phrases, we can narrow it down to find out what people might actually be searching for.*
Here’s a list of places on your website where you should be including your keywords:
1. URL/ Domain Name
2. Site Title
3. Site Description
4. Meta Tags (Keywords)
5. Page Titles
6. Paragraph Titles
7. Page Content
8. Page Descriptions
9. Image Captions
10. Website Navigation
*Top Tip: Use Google keyword planner to find out how popular your search terms are.
So how do I get traffic to my website?
I’m so glad you asked that too! There are a few different ways…
Here are our top tips:
1. Google My Business
Where do you go when you’re looking for almost any business online? The all-knowing fountain of knowledge that is Google.
You can set your business up on Google in an afternoon – but why would you want to?
For starters, if you are linked to an address, you are much more likely to show up in local searches, especially if you nail your keywords and phrases. As we travel around the country, we rely on Google Maps to tell us information like, where does the best curry within a mile of us… all we do is search “Indian Restaurants near me.”
Now your business is becoming friends with Google, you’re helping your business become recognised by search engines quicker, and because this means you are more trusted, get the VIP treatment and your page will be shown higher up in searches a lot faster. Secondly, get your reviews in. In our search for curry, we look at not only what is close to us, but also what local people are saying. How many stars did they give? What was their experience like? How good are the bhajis? By getting your customers to review you on Google, you’ll continue to you climb up the rankings and be more trusted by new customers who are finding you for the first time. And it’s free! Why would you not? Visit GoogleMyBusiness to add your business to Google
2. Blogging & Guesting
When you blog, you are essentially writing articles either from your opinions, reviews, learnings, or stating hard facts. It helps you keep your website fresh and gives your visitors a reason to return. Creating shareable content through a blog is an awesome way of boosting traffic and leveraging the audience you already have. Another alternative in the same subject is guest blogging. Build trust with a blogger who has an audience you want to reach and offer to write a blog for them. That way you can leverage each other’s audience to grow yours and boost your traffic. It’s a win-win! By writing a blog for someone else, you’re saving them a job and also giving them some new content. In return, you get access to their audience and also achieve some credibility by being featured!
3. YouTube
YouTube has a massive community base. YouTube is a platform where you can upload and host video content, comment on your and other people’s videos, build a subscriber base and really add value! It’s excellent for finding new people, showing them your best content, and sending them through to your website. We have also found that using YouTube to host your videos and then embedding them into your website, acts as a backlink and can help boost your website. You can also use YouTube’s already huge SEO and leverage having a channel on their platform to show up higher in the search engines. Although it may not be your website that comes up, your YouTube channel should be pointing everyone to your website when they find you.
4. Backlinks
These are more of a discreet and background way of improving your SEO. When Google looks at a website, its main aim is to provide as much value to the end-user as possible so it wants to find the website that provides exactly what the user is looking for. Backlinks help with this as Google will see your website as a hub of activity with traffic moving both to and from it.
A backlink is a link that goes either from your website to another or from another website to yours; even better if people use those links too. Now, this doesn’t mean that you should make a page full of random links and hope it works. You should include links to other sites that are legimate and should be used whenever referencing something or someone else. For example, if you’re running an event in collaboration with another company, put a link to their website and get them to do the same back to yours!
5. Social Media
Twitter and Facebook have been the source for pushing huge traffic to our website, which has generated thousands of pounds worth of sales! Twitter is a social media platform entirely based on conversations and connecting with people. Imagine it like one of those business networking events… But multiply that by 100 and put it on steroids; that’s Twitter.
Facebook is built around social interaction but more importantly, people’s interests and friendship circles. You can use pages, groups and sharing posts to tap into this brilliantly! With all social media, the end goal should always be pointing traffic to your website, grabbing people’s attention, adding value and pushing them through to where they can buy your stuff.
6. Adverts
Facebook has proven to be one of the highest traffic drivers for us and many other businesses over the years, although it’s fair to say, in our experience, Facebook has recently made it trickier for to drive traffic to external websites unless you pay for ‘boosted posts’ or adverts because Facebook wants traffic to stay on Facebook. Once you’ve made a bit of cash and have some to experiment, give it a go! We use it to fill our courses, but it should never be relied on and can never replace the power of connection and direct marketing.
7. Credible listings
Everyone has a place they look when they’re looking for a business. A lot of the time it’s Google, occasionally it’s directory websites like yell.com or local advertisers, and the reason for this is so they can find a trusted business quickly. By getting yourself on to some of the credible listings, you can actually gain a lot of traction through trusted sources! For example, if a restaurant is listed on google maps, people are much more like to find it and trust it because of how they found out about it. Aside from the credibility, if you can get yourself on a high-traffic listing, it will naturally boost your traffic too.
8. Interview experts
Sometimes, as good as you are at what you do, there is always someone else who has a bigger or different audience than you. So how can we leverage this? One of the best ways to drive traffic is to find, talk to and interview these people. Find someone who has a different audience from you and create content around that person. Maybe you’re writing articles about money and finance… why not find an expert in the field and ask them the questions your audience wants to know? What’s better, is that you’re not only providing your audience with great content, you also get the leverage of their channels, shouting about the latest interview they’ve done with you.
9. Build your email list
This point is probably the most important of all. If you are getting traffic to your website, but you are not capturing them, you might as well not have them at all. A customer list is one of the most important things a business can have because it is a list of people who that are interested in what you do, that you can message directly and sell to. Sounds like a dream, right?! MAKE ONE.
Put it this way: if you have 100 people visit your website and only 10 people buy something, what happens to the other 90? Do we just let them leave? Hell no! We should be capturing them for a later date. If they’re on your website in the first place, they’re interested in what you do to some degree. They might not be ready to buy right now, but they’re interested. By offering them an alternative to buying and getting their email instead, you can remind them about you further down the line.
Now, we’re aware that’s a lot of stuff! You won’t be in a position to do them all straight away. Pick a few and move on with life. Building your SEO is a great way of building your website up, but at the end of the day, going out and finding customers and selling to them directly is ALWAYS going to get better results. Your SEO is something that will grow over time Google will change and things will move around, so as long as you keep your website relevant, valuable, and active, you will be fine.
Let us know which of these methods you’ve chosen to use and let us know how it goes! We’d love to hear about your successes, but more importantly your challenges, then we can work through them together.
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